6 FORESTRY IN SPAIN. 



The arboriculture of Britain may seem to leave little to 

 be desired; but nowhere, perhaps, are forests treated with 

 greater recklessness than they have been in some of our 

 colonies and dependencies. In India, however, and in some 

 of our colonies, an endeavour is now being made to arrest 

 the destructive practices which have prevailed, and to 

 introduce a system of treatment of forests more in accord- 

 ance with the advanced forest science of the day. 



In the United States of America, and in Canada, there 

 have been effected extensive clearings of forest lands, 

 resulting in injurious effects upon the climate, and in a 

 greatly diminished supply of timber, with no prospect of 

 this being compensated by the subsequent growth of trees in 

 the localities. And in some of ourcolonies extensive forests 

 have been treated like beds of onions, leeks, cabbages, 

 and turnips, in the kitchen garden. Trees deemed suit- 

 able for some purpose desired have been felled, others 

 around them have been left standing, or have been cut 

 down to allow of the felled timber being brought out ; 

 and the results have been scarcely less destructive than 

 the forest clearings elsewhere. These results may be seen 

 in what were once forest -lands in the colony of the Cape 

 of Good Hope. 



More than 200 years ago France was in danger of being 

 entirely devastated by this system of jnrdinage in the 

 exploitation of forests, and in 1669 there was issued an 

 ordinance which soon became extensively famous, and 

 is famous still requiring the forests to be divided 

 into a specified number of sections, one only of 

 which should be exploited at a time, so as to allow time 

 for the trees to be reproduced in each before all the others 

 had been exploited in succession. The measure was not 

 new, but was one likely, where adopted, to save not only 

 France, but also other countries in Europe from devasta- 

 tion. Less than 150 years sufficed to show that this 

 was a vain hope, for the reproduced forests were not equal 

 to those which had been felled. And early in the present 

 century there was devised, in Saxony, a more complicated, 



